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Travelport pulls back iron curtain for further drive into Eastern Europe
Travelport is gearing up for a push into the business travel market in Eastern Europe after experiencing good growth in region’s leisure sector. The distribution giant, which has established three...
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Indian giant MakeMyTrip makes its next moves
One out of every 12 domestic air tickets are booked through MakeMyTrip the Indian travel agency. The company claims it is the largest online seller of tickets in India. Here’s a round-up of what’s new...
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Seamless, smart and straightforward: a path to generating revenue from mobile...
We posted a mobile commerce infographic earlier this week, and a comment from Pankaj Gabba really hit on one of the most insightful nuggets of that graphic: “80% of consumers abandon a mobile site if...
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Beyond social, research shows hotels looking offline to drive direct bookings
Thought-provoking new research by Ecole Hôtelière de Lausanne and RateTiger suggests hotels are looking beyond the marketing channels of the online ecosystem towards more traditional paths to direct...
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How image selection affects click-through rates on OTA hotel listings
The images hotels choose to display in their OTA booking paths have significant impact on CTRs, a recent study by Intent Media has found. In previous tests, Intent Media claims Courtyard Kauai in...
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TUI Travel acquires MalaPronta, Brazil’s rising OTA
Europe’s largest tour operator, TUI Travel Accommodation & Destinations, has acquired Brazil’s fourth largest hotel-only online travel company, MalaPronta.com. With this move, the UK-listed TUI...
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CheapAir unveils semantic search for booking flights with natural language...
Aiming to make travel search more intelligent, CheapAir.com has begun beta-testing Easy Search, a semantic search tool that allows users to pose natural language flight queries instead of choosing...
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SHOCKING: Everyone wants OTA disclosure of all airline fees!
In a shocking reversal of common sense, sorry, revelation of the obvious, a recent survey found that 94% of travelers using online travel sites want all airline fee information freely available to them...
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Why Priceline’s purchase of Booking.com was the most profitable travel deal...
In July 2005, The Priceline Group acquired European hotel booking website Booking.com, helping to catapult Priceline from a profit of $10 million in 2003 to a profit of $1.1 billion last year. No other...
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Booking.com says it isn’t harming hotel owners by putting canceled rooms up...
Booking.com has no reservations about its new re-sale practice for canceled rooms. Since the start of this year, Booking.com has implemented a function, market by market, that changes what happens when...
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French hoteliers voice concern about OTA business practices
Hoteliers are often frustrated by the significant fees charged for bookings via OTAs. The trend among many hotels is to do whatever it takes to encourage more direct bookings that circumvent the OTA...
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Bravofly’s purchase of Rumbo consolidates the European OTA landscape
On Friday, Bravofly, a Swiss search engine for low-cost air and hotel bookings, said that it would buy Spanish OTA Rumbo in a deal is worth approximately €74 million ($95 million). Axa Private Equity...
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Putting the supplier cart before the distributor horse in travel
Imagine yourself walking into a grocery store. The shelves are stocked full of brightly labelled cans and boxes of goods. You gaze in awe at the vast selection of product. Excited to purchase...
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Forget Street View: HeliView adds an aerial twist on hotel shopping and...
HeliView is an innovation that offers “interactive visual travel search.” Users of this service at a German OTA can take a virtual overhead tour of a destination by watching aerial videos that are...
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Turning tides: Travel agents losing steam as a cruise distribution channel
Travel technology has not always been kind to certain industry cohorts: travel agents being one of the endlessly highlighted losers of the accelerated pace towards the online sales. The narrative goes...
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OTAs outshine metasearch sites in sending traffic to air and hotel suppliers,...
New research out of PhoCusWright sheds interesting light on how well online travel agencies (OTAs) are performing in the US relative to metasearch sites, which aggregate fares and hotel offers from...
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US consumer travel spend booming, crossing major threshold in 2012
Economy fretting aside, the United States saw a historic uptick in consumer travel spending, reaching $100 billion for the first time in 2012. This is a significant milestone, as the industry has shown...
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Speed demons and slowpokes: These are the travel industry benchmarks
Technology performance company Compuware has released their latest data on site speed, both on mobile and desktop, for various verticals. The company has tested the speed of hotel/resort, airlines,...
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Russian OTA Oktogo nets $11 million round
Booming Russian online travel agency (OTA) Oktogo.ru has raised $11 million in its latest financing round, raising its total to $26 million. Not bad for a company that only earned $30 million in 2012....
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Booking.com dominates in Switzerland as OTAs steal share from direct channels
Some interesting stats from eTourism Monitor here on who is dominating the online hotel world in Switzerland. Just under a third (30%) of all hotel bookings are generated electronically through...
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